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Automatically getting your account blocked and all of your games disabled if you log in again after having been offline for a very long time (regardless of what the reason was) has nothing to do with paranoia.

Apart from that, I just think I should have full control over with whom I want to share when and what I play, without any major or minor inconveniences. Juggling Steam copies and whatnot should not be necessary. Seriously, I already paid for the games.

You can connect once, buy the game, put Steam in offline mode and never connect again.

At least if you never ever want to buy a game on Steam again. Otherwise, as soon as you connect again, it will automatically upload to Steam statistics regarding how much you've played the game, what "achievements" you've unlocked etc (even if you disable SteamPlay/auto-synchronisation).

And if you have bad luck, Steam will have blocked your account in the mean time because you haven't logged in for over a year and when the Steam application detects that, it will block all games you have locally because it no longer has valid cached credentials (you can't got back to offline mode). And then you can't play anymore until you've contacted support to have them unblock/reset your account. And yes, that happened to me.

It's true, you don't have to be online all the time. But you better be online either regularly or never again at all.

But is there really a point of having ARM64 on an ultra low cost system? Its not like you are gonna be using the increased bandwidth or large memory amounts that 64bits brings to the table on a sub $150 SoC, hell I seriously doubt the board will have enough bandwidth on its I/O to even saturate a 32bit pipeline.

I think the main point is to have a low-cost development board that people can use to port their software to AArch64 and/or test it on that platform (as said by the AC I originally replied to). I'm also sure that even with bandwidth limitations, the octocore will prove its worth when running our compiler test suite.

Additionally, the AArch64 instruction set has been redesigned from scratch and a lot of historical baggage and special cases have been thrown out (e.g. no more arbitrary changing the PC with half of the available instructions, and no more two different instruction sets with dynamic switching between them), so it wouldn't surprise me if over time AArch64 processors could actually become more power-efficient than regular ARM cores. Right now the AArch64 cores still include the ability to run regular ARM code too, but I'm pretty sure that over time this functionality as well as the entire regular ARM line will be dropped in favour of AArch64.

Disclaimer: I am and have been one of the FPC developers for the past 17.5 years (also starting originally with Turbo Pascal, and then moving on to FPC once it became clear Borland wouldn't come out with a 32 bit DOS version).

This is an inherent contradiction between Islam and western society, and it cannot be reconciled without either giving up on religious freedom, or throwing away the Quran. They're not allowed to edit it.

And yet there large numbers of moderate muslims that do not feel at all obliged or even inclined to impose the sharia on the rest of the Western country they live in. Maybe they're not real muslims in the eyes of fundamentalists, but why should we take the same view as fundamentalists in this regard while we reject them on all other points?

The Americas were, for the most part, colonised by European immigrants that kicked the shit out of the people that already lived there. I really don't see how that's different than what happening now (or is about to happen) in Europe in the mind of many scared/aggressive people. And for the record: I don't hold current day Americans responsible for that, it's not like they got to choose what their forefathers did or did not do, although of historically/societally you do have some kind of responsibility (just like e.g. Belgium has one vis-a-vis its ex-colonies).

The European countries are ethnic states, have been for thousands of years, and their borders are almost literally written in blood.

Ethnic states? Our borders are indeed written in blood (then again, so are many in the Americas), but I doubt there are many "ethnic Belgians" in existence. Or have ever existed, other than one tribe in a distant past that was termed as "the bravest of all Gallic tribes" by Julius Caesar.

While Europe is exceedingly liberal and politically correct in general, it would be 'unwise' indeed, to mistake generosity and kindness for weakness.

The way many people are reacting, it seems they did find a quite weak spot though.

Boko Haram has stated openly they are an Islamic group and are trying to form an ISIS like African Caliphate . What more do you need to see the truth?

Have a look at http://www.cfr.org/nigeria/bok... . Yes, Boko Haram is a very violent and abhorrent group (or rather a set of groups) right now, but they weren't always like that. Their current actions also have little or nothing to do with Islam (a bit like how "spreading democracy" had little to do with the Iraq war). At the same time, the Nigerian "Joint Task Force" of Nigerian police, army and private security forces (primarily funded by oil companies) is regularly accused of "summary executions, use of excessive force, and widespread arrests of suspected extremists, many based on little or no evidence" (words of the US Department of State, not mine) in the Niger delta (where Boko Haram is active). The paragraph in which that sentence appears also sketches the situation after 2009 (when Boko Haram became violent) quite well.

The JTF has been active since 2003 though, and some people directly argue (albeit in a mess of many missing/broken links that make it hard to check several argued points) that they basically made Boko Haram into what it is today with the objective of being able to justify the use of excessive force against them.

I still have to read up more on it from different sources, but from what I've read until now it seems that really has very little to do with Islam. It's just the banner they use due to their origins, just like we in the West (not just the US) justify almost all of our actions with "helping democracy", "supporting human rights", "increasing free trade" etc, even when that banner doesn't cover the actions at all. In many cases, it's mainly a cultural reference to something that the people involved (on the "aggressor's" side) can identify with as "good" or that they can relate to.

At least one of us is. I basically gave up on AAA games after (a) DRM stuff got silly, and (b) several titles in a row had such serious bugs that they just weren't enjoyable to play, and often they were never fixed.

A couple of AAA games have been/will be released on day 1 via http://gog.com/ without DRM: Age of Wonders III, Divinty: Original Sin, The Witcher 2 and 3, Pillars of Eternity.